Latvian Soldiers of World War II

An estimated 200,000 Latvian soldiers—ten percent of the total prewar population of Latvia— served on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Since the Republic of Latvia had been occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, then occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941, these soldiers did not serve in in the Latvian Army. Instead, they served in Soviet and German uniform, primarily in Latvian national formations in the Soviet Union’s Red Army (in its final form, the 130th Latvian Rifle Corps) and Nazi Germany’s Waffen SS (ultimately, the VI SS Army Corps (Latvian), more colloquially known as the Latvian Legion). After the war, parallel political movements led by front-line veterans emerged: a network of anti-communist Cold War Latvian activists in the West and a National Communist political faction that pushed the boundaries of the post-Stalin thaw in 1950s Soviet Latvia. Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service traces the origins, wartime experience, and legacies of soldiers from Latvia who fought in national formations on both sides of the Eastern Front. Through the lenses of social, cultural, and political history, this book analyzes military records and government documents drawn from archives across four countries to uncover how these national formations were created in negotiations between the occupying powers and Latvian advocates. Utilizing first-person primary sources (“ego-documents”)-including wartime interviews, diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories-this book reveals how Latvian soldiers adapted to their new ideological settings and incubated Latvian nationalist ideas while serving in the armies of occupying powers. These soldiers distinguished themselves in combat on both sides, with the Latvian Legion becoming the most decorated non-Germanic unit of the Waffen-SS and the Latvian Rifle Corps emerging as a highly decorated Red Army formation, one division of which earned the designation of an elite Guards unit. Veterans of each side then became key political actors in postwar Soviet Latvia and the Latvian diaspora in the West respectively. After the war, the victorious Latvian Riflemen gradually became marginalized-first in Soviet Latvia, then in independent Latvia-while the defeated Waffen-SS Latvian Legionnaires successfully integrated into Cold War-era Western democracies and developed durable institutions and narratives in exile that were later imported into post-Soviet Latvia. In the memory wars that followed World War II, wartime victors became the losers of history and the “lost cause” of the defeated side triumphed, yielding ongoing tensions both within Latvia and between Latvia and other countries, most notably Russia.